As You See the Images of the Refugee Crisis

1% Climate Change, 99% power-hungry bastards.
Here’s a poem that came off FB:

“HOME,” by Somali poet Warsan Shire:

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbours running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here.

Not sure about ISIS, but Global Baking (TM) has definitely been the driver of the Sudan/South-Sudan rift. Desertfication marched southward, and desert dwellers pushed out farmers in its wake.

I have been frustrated by the vacuousness of the news coverage of the migrant crisis.

First, Europe doesn’t exist. If Europe can’t save Greece, let alone the rest of the Southern and Eastern Tiers, how can it save all these migrants?

Sure, it’s relatively cheap, a few billions versus tens of billions for Greece et al, for Germany to take in 40,000 migrants this year, but second and as Ian points out, this is not a one year deal. What Ian does not mention and should is population. Under present trends by 2050, the US will have a population of nearly 400 million, most of this growth will come from immigrants and their children. We can already see the strains in our society made worse by the kleptocracy of the rich and elites who rule us. If we will have extreme problems coping, think about Europe and the rest of the world also saddled with their kleptocracies. Although it is not politic to say so, but as I have, Europe was falling apart before this crisis. And yet it is looking at one to three million migrants a year entering it for the next 50 years.

Consider for a moment that a country like Nigeria had a population of 32 million in 1950 and is projected to have a population of 391 million in 2050 or roughly the same as ours at that point. It is already only a marginally functioning state at its current population of 182 million (data from the US Census). And it is hardly alone. We have seen revolution and repression in Egypt with a population of 88 million. What will it be like in 2050 with a population of 138 million? Or Ethiopia with a population in 2050 of 228 million? Or Uganda, a country the size of Oregon, with a population of 93 million? These aren’t just unsustainable numbers. They are wildly, scary, unsustainable ones. And with them, and made worse by kleptocracy, will come enormous species and ecosystem destruction, acceleration of global climate disruption, and tens of millions and eventually hundreds of millions of those trying to escape these conditions.

But you really won’t see a discussion, intelligent or otherwise, of this in the coverage. You won’t see how Turkey, a NATO member which has acted as a funnel for foreign fighters to ISIS and which has sponsored broad smuggling across its border in support of ISIS, is also allowing the transit of migrants across its territory and via Turkish traffickers to Greece. You won’t see how a country bankrupted by Germany like Greece is supposed to take care of this never ending flow of migrants. You will see a country like Hungary heavily criticized for its treatment of the migrants, but not so much of its near bankruptcy at the hands of Western Europe which gave rise to the current corrupt authoritarians who now run it. Like Greece, Hungary is not a big country or a rich one. What is it expected to do with 50,000 migrants wandering throught its countryside? Has anyone thought about what a health hazard this is? When was the last time any of these had a shower? Where are they pissing and shitting and cleaning themselves? Where is their garbage going? How are they getting food? What are they using for money? Are they up on their vaccinations? Is ISIS infiltrating them? These may be inconvenient, unpleasant questions, but they need to not only be asked but answered. Is any of this being done by the media? No.

And then there are the larger social questions. We all understand that these people want to come to Europe for a “better life”. But what will they contribute to the societies they wish to enter? Do they want to contribute anything? It is not clear how many have any useful skills. Again it is not politic to talk about it, but these are people from countries with radically different languages, cultures, political traditions, and religions from most of Europe. Will they assimilate? How much?

As more and more come, what will be their effect on wage levels. In this country, migrants have helped depress US wages. The silence of the media on all this is deafening. Instead we get “if it bleeds, it leads” coverage of the migrant crisis in Europe, and in the US, the converse, coverage of Trump railing against the immigrant labor which has built and staffed so many of his hotels and resorts and threatening to deport 11 million of them. And more silence on the simple solution of punitively fining employers who hired illegals or discriminated against legal immigrants and citizens. I see all this and it gives me whiplash from all the incoherent and contradictory storylines, i.e. lies, I am being hit with.

And violent. Not just war and pestilence, but violence born of desperation.

I suggested a number of years ago we all need to grow thicker skin. The anthropogenic atmospheric disruption alone could take Billions with a B of lives, not only of sea level rises but hemispheric wide storms of the sort we of the Pacific Northwest are so familiar, only hurricane force uprooting what are euphemistic known as “old growth” forests. The cascading War, the resulting break down of basic sanitation, food and.water or a mass, or perhaps multiple migrations could easily take billions more – may not be ill upon departure but the odds of that upon arrival are slim. I.gear our grandchildren, my great grandchildren, are not going to think well of us.